Scientists prove human heart can regenerate cells

Scientists said on Thursday they had shown the human body regenerates heart cells at a rate of about one percent a year, a discovery that could one day reduce the need for transplants.

The study of 50 volunteers, using a dating method that detects traces of a carbon isotope left by Cold War nuclear bomb tests, raises the prospect of artificially stimulating the renewal process some day, they reported in the journal Science.

“It would be a way to try and help the heart to some self-help rather than transplanting new cells,” Jonas Frisen of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute said in a telephone interview.

“Taking advantage of the heart’s own capacity to generate new cells either using pharmaceutical compounds or, if it is possible, by exercise or any other environmental factor.”

Heart cells are unusual in that they stop dividing early in life. Doctors knew there were master cells called stem cells in the heart, but heart muscle usually simply forms scar tissue after damage and never fully regenerates. …

Frisen said the rate at which the new cells are produced slows as we get older, with a young adult in their twenties renewing cells at a rate of about 1 percent a year, falling to half a percent a year by the age of 75.

“If you exchange cells at this rate it means that even if you live a very long life you will not have exchanged more than 50 percent of your cells,” said Frisen. “So at any given time your heart is a mosaic of cells you carry with you from birth and cells that that have been added later to replace cells that have been lost during life.”

The finding could also help scientists determine whether some people are predisposed to heart disease, by looking at the heart’s ability to renew cells.

via NewsDaily: Scientists prove human heart can regenerate cells.

If memories and emotions are stored in the heart muscle and/or the heart’s brain, if heart cells are damaged by romantic disappointment, then taking several years to heal after a heart break now makes much more sense. Even if that theory is wrong, it is great to know that hearts do heal.

Did you know your heart has a brain of its own?

The heart’s nervous system contains around 40,000 neurons, called sensory neurites, which detect circulating hormones and neurochemicals and sense heart rate and pressure information. – link

According to David Sousa, “They come in different sizes, but it takes about 30000 brain neurons to fit on the head of a pin.”

Virus battery could ‘power cars’

Viruses have been used to help build batteries that may one day power cars and all types of electronic devices.

The speed and relatively cheap cost of manufacturing virus batteries could prove attractive to industry.

Professor Angela Belcher, who led the research team, said: “Our material is powerful enough to be able to be used in a car battery.”

The team from MIT in the US is now working on higher power batteries. …

The virus is a so-called common bacteriophage which infects bacteria and is harmless to humans. Three years ago the MIT scientists manipulated genes inside a virus that coaxed the particles to grow and self-assemble to form a nanowire anode one-tenth the width of a human hair.

The microbes are encouraged to collect exotic materials – cobalt oxide and gold – and because the particles are negatively charged, they can be formed into a dense, virus-loaded film which acts as an anode and “grows” on a polymer separator.

Researchers, including MIT Professor Gerbrand Ceder and Associate Professor Michael Strano, have now developed a highly powerful cathode. The work was more difficult because the material had to be highly conductive in order to be effective and most candidate materials for cathodes are highly insulating.

… The virus was coaxed into binding with iron phosphate and then carbon nanotubes to create a highly conductive material.

The batteries have the same energy capacity and power performance as rechargeable batteries used to power plug-in hybrid cars.

The prototype battery is currently the size of a coin but the scientists believe it can be scaled and be used to create flexible batteries that can take the shape of their container, which is perfect for mobile or small devices.

The scientists have also been able to create micro-batteries which could be used to power a future generation of tiny devices.

“The advantage of using genetics is that things can be made better and better,” explained Professor Belcher.

via BBC NEWS | Technology | Virus battery could ‘power cars’.

We created the Mynocks. This is how it all began. They will be flying around asteroids and chewing on the power cables of our ships before you know it.

No Sponge In Human Family Tree: Sponges Descended From Unique Ancestor

Since the days of Charles Darwin, researchers are interested in reconstructing the “Tree of Life”, and in understanding the development of animal and plant species during their evolutionary history. In the case of vertebrates, this research has already come quite a long way. But there is still much debate about the relationships between the animal groups that made their apparation very early in evolutionary history, probably in the late Precambrian, some 650 to 540 million years ago.

…In the most comprehensive study of its kind, the researchers show that all sponges descended from a unique sponge ancestor, who in turn was not the ancestor of all other animals. That means that humans did not descend from a sponge-like organism either, as some scientists have put forward. Moreover, the results also suggest that the nervous system only evolved once in animal history.

The most ancient animal groups (phyla) include the Porifera (sponges), Placozoa, Cnidaria, and Ctenophora (comb jellies). The sponges are extremely simply built, and have no organs. The placozoans also have a very simple structure. They have a flat, disk-shaped body, and no organs either. Comb jellies, the ctenophores, are life forms that resemble jellyfish. The true jellyfish, however, are part of the cnidarians, a phylum that also includes corals and sea anemones.

via No Sponge In Human Family Tree: Sponges Descended From Unique Ancestor.

All life could still have one common ancestor, but a split happened before sponges and we are not from the sponge branch.  If you want to study how different from us alien life may be, check out a sponge… and think about how big the ocean would be … if sponges didn’t grow in it.

Strange Exits: Skeleton found in tree 29 years after suicide

The skeleton of the 69-year-old was discovered 11 metres above ground level with a gun next to it. He had vanished in the summer of 1980 but thick branches and leaves had obscured his body. The man was only found after parts of the skeleton began to detach and fall to the ground. Bones were discovered by a man walking his dog in the forest. “It looks as if he meant to never be found again ” said a police spokesman in Landshut north-east of Munich the town where Heinrich Himmler grew up.

via Skeleton found in tree 29 years after suicide – Telegraph.

What percentage of people who do this are never found? How many people go missing each year? Ghost trees are calling people… getting into their heads … planting suggestions… the forests are fighting back.

Robo-scientist’s first findings

Scientists have created an ideal colleague – a robot that performs hundreds of repetitive experiments.

The robot, called Adam, is the first machine to have independently “discovered new scientific knowledge”.

It has already identified the role of several genes in yeast cells, and is able to plan further experiments to test its own hypotheses.

The UK-based team that built Adam at Aberystwyth University describes the breakthrough in the journal Science.

Ross King from the department of computer science at Aberystwyth University, and who led the team, told BBC News that he envisaged a future when human scientists’ time would be “freed up to do more advanced experiments”.

Robotic colleagues, he said, could carry out the more mundane and time-consuming tasks.

“Adam is a prototype but, in 10-20 years, I think machines like this could be commonly used in laboratories,” said Professor King.

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Robo-scientist’s first findings.

It is by playing, pouring liquids into different sized cups, and so on, that we build huge databases as children about how the world works.

Punjab disability ‘uranium link’

Tests on children with cerebral palsy or mental disabilities in the Indian state of Punjab have revealed high levels of uranium. A charity based in Faridkot city said chemical analyses of hair specimens collected from 149 children in its care showed “unexpected amounts” of toxins.

The children included in the study were all under 13, it said.

The result has baffled the authorities as there are no known sources of uranium in Punjab.

‘Startling’

The chemical tests were conducted on the suggestion of Dr Carin Smit, a South African metal toxicologist associated with the UK-based non-governmental organisation Defeat Autism Now. Samples of hair collected from the 149 children, then resident at the Faridkot-based charity, Baba Farid Centre for Special Children, were tested at Trace Mineral, a laboratory in Germany.

The results were startling, Prithpal Singh, head of Baba Farid, said.

“Around 80% of the samples, including those from children with cerebral palsy, revealed the presence of uranium in levels that the experts have described as pathological,” Mr Singh said.

via BBC NEWS | South Asia | Punjab disability ‘uranium link’.

Dang. Good thang we don’t have got us none uh that Yooou-rain-um over here in the US of A. We found a place to put it. Don’t worry about where. Some place.

Award for twins switched at birth

Do you have a secret twin?

A court in Poland has awarded just over $500,000 (£339,000) in damages to the families of three women mistakenly switched at birth by hospital staff.

Two of the women are identical twins who grew up in separate families because of the mix-up.

The mistake was only discovered 17 years later after a chance meeting in the Polish capital, Warsaw.

In 1984, two-week-old identical twins Kasia and Nina were taken to a Warsaw hospital with pneumonia.

While they were there staff mistakenly switched Nina with another girl, Adita.

Afterwards doctors told the twins’ parents they were not identical as first thought and so when the girls grew up nobody realised the mistake.

It was only 17 years later that Kasia was told by a friend that she was the double of another girl who lived across town.

Kasia arranged to meet her double and the pair discovered that not only did they share the same birthday, that they had similar birth marks and tastes.

Later, DNA tests confirmed the discovery.

It came as a shock to both families and has taken a heavy toll on everyone involved, especially the twins’ mother.

via BBC NEWS | Europe | Award for twins switched at birth.

Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Quantum setback for warp drives

… “Warp drives would become rapidly unstable once superluminal speeds are reached,” say Stefano Finazzi at the International School for Advanced Studies in Trieste, Italy, and a couple of friends.

Warp drives have been the focus of science fiction writers for decades. But scientists kept them at arms length until 1994 when the idea was put on a firm (ish) theoretical footing by the Mexican physicist, Michael Alcubierre. His thinking is that while relativity prevents faster-than-light travel relative to the fabric of space time, it places no restriction on the speed at which regions of spacetime may move relative to each other.

Alcubierre imagined a small volume of flat spacetime in which a spacecraft might sit, surrounded by a highly distorted bubble of spacetime which shrinks in the direction of travel, bringing your destination nearer, and stretches behind you. He showed that this shrinking and stretching could enable the bubble–and the spaceship it contained–to move at superluminal speeds.

The conclusion is the result of classical thinking using the ideas of general relativity but physicists have long wondered what would happen if you threw quantum mechanics into the mix? Now Finazzi and pals have worked it. For a start, they say that the inside of the bubble would be filled with Hawking radiation, making life rather uncomfortable for any spacecraft within it.

They have also studied a property of a quantum field called the renormalised stress-energy tensor which should be well-behaved under normal circumstances. But in the front wall of Alcubierre’s bubble travelling at superluminal speeds, the renormalised stress-energy tensor grows exponentially.

That strongly implies that such a bubble would be unstable. So it looks increasingly likely that, after a brief few years of excitement, Alcubierre’s warp drive is impossible. …

via Technology Review: Blogs: arXiv blog: Quantum setback for warp drives.

Absurd. Every kid knows that the  Millennium Falcon made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.

China pays deer price for condor protection

Chinese conservationists are in a fix over endangered condors eating large numbers of a protected species of deer in a reserve in the north of the country state media said on Friday.

More than 100 young spotted deer have been eaten by the condors so far this spring at the Luanhe River National Nature Reserve in Hebei province near Beijing the official Xinhua news agency said becoming an “unanticipated” part of the food chain.

Nationally the condor is considered far more endangered than the deer. “The raptors are growing in number and threatening to catch larger animals like elk in the reserve ” it quoted wildlife official Zhou Changhong as saying.

The reserve only has 600 or so deer and just 10 elk, the report added.

“An adult condor has a wingspan of more than two metres, and not even wardens can frighten it,” Zhou said.

via China pays deer price for condor protection | Oddly Enough | stv News.

If only there was some species that was not engagered …. I can’t think of any right now.

Being Isaac Newton: Computer Derives Natural Laws From Raw Data

If Isaac Newton had access to a supercomputer, he’d have had it watch apples fall – and let it figure out the physical matters. But the computer would have needed to run an algorithm, just developed by Cornell researchers, which can derive natural laws from observed data. The researchers have taught a computer to find regularities in the natural world that become established laws – yet without any prior scientific knowledge on the part of the computer. They have tested their method, or algorithm, on simple mechanical systems and believe it could be applied to more complex systems ranging from biology to cosmology and be useful in analyzing the mountains of data generated by modern experiments that use ele

The research is published in the journal Science (April 3, 2009) by Hod Lipson, Cornell associate professor of mechanical and aerospace engineering, and graduate student Michael Schmidt, a specialist in computational biology.

Their process begins by taking the derivatives of every variable observed with respect to every other – a mathematical way of measuring how one quantity changes as another changes. Then the computer creates equations at random using various constants and variables from the data. It tests these against the known derivatives, keeps the equations that come closest to predicting correctly, modifies them at random and tests again, repeating until it literally evolves a set of equations that accurately describe the behavior of the real system.

Technically, the computer does not output equations, but finds “invariants” – mathematical expressions that remain true all the time.

“Even though it looks like it’s changing erratically, there is always something deeper there that is always constant,” Lipson explained

via Being Isaac Newton: Computer Derives Natural Laws From Raw Data.

We have detected an anomaly in the system…